L.A. PARKER: We can't afford to accept murder as part of city life

With only one errand necessary in between a 15-minute ride toward a dinner date in Hopewell Township, we had time to kill.

A police car had just stopped in front of Bilancio’s Liquors on Hamilton Ave. We could see another police vehicle’s lights in the distance, warp speeding toward a developing crime scene that would continue this capital city’s gut-buster, record breaking homicide mark.

Murder debates set the current number at 37 or 41, depending on your scorecard.

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Seems only right that a city, which chalked up a first murder just hours into 2013, should claim a couple more late deaths before closing the casket on this deadliest season, sort of set the bar at such a height that no killers in their unrighteous minds could ever surpass this new underworld mark.

Two thousand and thirteen had come in like a lion and departs with similar ferocity, a final push toward infamy.

Thirty-one murders seemed like overkill in 2005, but the City of Trenton cultivated a cauldron for homicide as gangs turned streets into battlegrounds of turf wars.

One could almost smell the leaked blood of victim Robert Wright, 32, following an assault of the known drug dealer outside Bilancio’s.

While 2005 delivered shootings that frequently sparked almost immediate retaliation. Trenton gang members have morphed into calculated cold-blooded killers.

Surgical removals of drug competitors or gang rivals have somehow made gun toters less menacing. They kill with less rampage, meticulously meting out death to rivals or on-street victims.

Observers need only compare the 2009 street murder of Tamrah Leonard, 13, who died an innocent victim in a hailstorm of bullets meant for a Sex Money Murder Blood gang rival, to the rubout of Wright.

Leonard perished on a corner during a celebration on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard when drive-by killers fired aimlessly into a crowd, while an assassin erased Wright with a rampage of about a dozen shots under the cover of winter darkness and on an almost deserted Hamilton Avenue, although one other person suffered non-life threatening injuries.

We have reached the last day of the final month of this city’s most deadly year, but circumstances hardly seem tragic.

While outsiders view Trenton as an unstable crucible, one could say that city residents have learned to live with violence; accept murder; especially for those engaged in degenerative behavior.

Our massive murder counts have made us immune to the fact that lives are being taken. When we forget that murder is murder, even for those involved in antisocial behavior, then we die, too.

One could compare Trenton to a winter globe, picked up, shaken and then set down.

Life eventually settles until the next dust up of swirling headlines that report another Trenton murder.

We have grown accustomed to a violence that folds us into compromised positions of apathy.

My scuffed sole pressed into the gas pedal as one of the year’s final murder scenes faded in the rear view mirror.

“No. I have seen enough death for one year,” she heard.

— L.A. Parker is a Trentonian columnist. Reach him at laparker@trentonian.com. Twitter@laparker6.